Do e-books free us from distractions? Responding to Tim Parks

This morning Shelf Awareness serves up this quote of the day, and it stops me.  I think I might just move on, but I can't.

Because Parks' assertion that reading the e-book frees us from "everything extraneous and distracting" ... "to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves" in no way jibes with my experience.  Yes, I have downloaded dozens of books onto my iPad.  Sadly, I've left many of them stranded.  Unable to scribble in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline emphatically—unable, in other words, to engage in a physical way with the text—I grew distracted, disinterested, bored.  Yes, Michael Ondaatje will always keep me reading.  And so will the work of my friend Kelly Simmons, and the words of Julie Otsuka, Leah Hager Cohen, A.S. King, Timothy Schaffert, Paula Fox, and Justin Torres—though I wish I owned all of that work on paper.  But here on my iPad—stranded, unfinished—sit Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Andrew Winer's The Marriage Artist, Margaret Drabble's complete short stories, and many other tales. These are, most likely, extremely good books, and yet, I find myself incapable of focusing on them in their e-format.  I need to interact—physically—with the texts before me.  I can't do that, in the ways I'd like to do that, with a screen.

I am also, as a footnote, intrigued by Tim Parks' final lines, when he speaks of moving on from illustrated children's books.  With the rise of the graphic novel and the increasing insertion of images back into teen books (and I suspect we'll see that illustration encroachment continue), I wonder if we have really moved away from illustrated texts.  I wonder, too, if we should. Art is not just for juveniles, after all.

Here is the quote at length, as excerpted by Shelf Awareness.

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."

--Tim Parks in his post headlined "E-books Can't Burn" at the New York Review of Books blog

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This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories/Johanna Skibsrud: Reflections

It had entered the realm of the absurd:  I had been carrying Johanna Skibsrud's collection of nine short stories with me everywhere I went. This Will Be Difficult to Explain was so slender, after all, and had arrived unbidden from W.W. Norton.  I didn't know this author, but I was intrigued.  Consider the comparators: Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson.  Nicole Krauss, even.

The book traveled on the train, to client offices, to Body Combat, to ballroom dance, to the library, and in the passenger seat of the car, just for the apparent heck of it.  Meanwhile, weeks of inane insanity went by—a battle cry of must-do-right-now's.  I had carved out this very afternoon to work on my own Berlin book.  Time, at last, I thought, to advance my novel forward.  And then I decided:  It's now or never for Difficult.  I curled up beneath my patchwork quilt and read.

How very odd, I thought, as I sunk in with Skibsrud.  How delightfully odd.  Not Munro, for the stories aren't nearly that domestic, that relational.  And not Robinson nor Krauss, for the language here is not their kind of lush (I am thinking of early Robinson as I write, Housekeeping Robinson, and I am thinking of all of Krauss). These are stories advanced by oppositions—by things presumed, recanted, tested, withdrawn.  These are characters who want to know things, but, frankly, they often don't.  They want to declare, but is such declaration wise, or honest?  They want to describe, or even understand, but they are missing the words, the signals.

What might have been a series of straight-on tales—about a divorced father seeing his thirteen-year-old daughter for the first time in eight months, about a young maid catering to a strange man in France, about a blind woman speaking French to her English-languaged helpmate, about one ancient Clarence and the young journalist who sets out to interview him—becomes instead a play (and there is play) of juxtapositions.

The stories grew on me, the point of view.  The aperçus I didn't see coming.  The Timothy Schaffert (The Coffins of Little Hope) oddness of, say the title story or "Clarence."  The eloquent stumble toward truth, a la Robin Black (If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This) in a story such as "Signac's Boats." The stories grew on me, and not just a little.  I liked this Johanna Skibsrud.

I'm going to close with the final paragraph of a story I loved.  Tell me what you think.  I'm behind again on my Berlin book.  But I'm glad I took the detour.

From "The Limit":

He knows that on the East Coast and on the West, there is the imposition, always, of objects on other objects.  The sky is interrupted by the hills, the hills by the trees, the trees by more hills, and houses, and so on.  But out here, in the middle, it's possible to find a section of the road to look out at and not see anything for miles.  It is possible just to see and see until it gets hazy and you can't see anymore—and even at that point, at the point where you stop being able to see any longer, it's not because what's out there is covered up by anything, it's just—that's the limit.

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The Coffins of Little Hope/Timothy Schaffert: Reflections

These words from The Washington Post's Ron Charles drew me to The Coffins of Little Hope:

The Coffins of Little Hope is like an Edward Gorey cartoon stitched in pastel needlepoint. Its creepiness scurries along the edges of these heartwarming pages like some furry creature you keep convincing yourself you didn't see.

You're in, right?  You want to know more?  I bought the book, I got in and I stayed, from the very first line:

I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin's-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn't quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like.

 .... to the last:

You were young only minutes ago.

Reading the pages in between was like watching the lights of a carnival go on—the hurly burly commotion of color, the hyperkinetic blink of possibility, the flavorful oddness of a sui generis cast of characters.  There's Essie Myles, an 83-year-old obituary writer for the local, small-town paper.  There's the possible kidnapping of a possible daughter (yes, that's right, we never know for absolute certain if the kidnapped daughter is a scam or a true loss).  There's the final installment of a famed young adult book that's being printed by Essie's press.  Parts of that book get leaked (or are those parts the real book?)  Gentle weirdnesses come and go (but have they left forever?).  These small-town people face all kinds of trouble (or they make it up), and Schaeffert can't say no to the sweet tangent. 

It's a wild bob and weave.  It's profoundly and preposterously well-imagined.  There are lines here, plenty of them, that most writers would give their polished eye tooth to lay a claim to.  Taken together, Coffins is a delight—a book that you cannot wrangle with.  Just let it happen to you.  Stumble off, dazed.

     

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Girls in Wash of Blue (and what I'm reading)

Glasses up. Glasses on. No glasses.

Don't ask me why (my own brain processes often elude even me, the owner of this most porous brain), but this photograph symbolizes my changing relationship to books as I try to decide what to read in hardback, paperback, and iPad2-ery.

Just now, I've ordered the following from the Kindle Store:

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories (Margaret Drabble)
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox)
The Coffins of Little Hope (Timothy Schaffert)
Faith (Jennifer Haigh)
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)

These join the following to-be-read Kindle titles (I read both before, as real books):

Selected Stories (Andre Dubus)
Sophie's Choice (William Styron)

Now, from the iBook store:

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black

They all join Tara Altebrando's Dreamland Social Club—a real book, a hardcover, as my next reads.

I'll be reporting back, of course.

In the meantime, might I note how glad I have been to be hearing from my students during these summer days. Might I say, too, that I am grateful that there is a new generation of smart young souls who know how to use language—know where sentences begin and end, know, unprompted, how to eliminate their own redundancies, lean into the music. How you are needed. How valued you are. How you might save the world.

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